by Balz, Dan
Dillon and Bird brought Wagner to the reelection campaign, over some internal resistance, when they all moved to Chicago. Eventually the Obama campaign modeled practically everything—voters, states, volunteers, donors, anything that they could think of to improve their efficiency—to give them greater confidence in the decisions they were making. They wanted to know who was most likely to serve as a volunteer, and they created a model to tell them. They established record numbers of offices in the states, and record numbers of staging areas for volunteers, based in part on analysis of how much more likely people were to volunteer if they were close to an office. “We built a model on volunteer likelihood,” Stewart said. “We built a model on turnout, we built a model on support, we built a model on persuasion—who’s most persuadable.” Dillon described the ways in which the modeling aided fund-raising. “We could model the likelihood of someone being at home during the day and more likely to answer the telephone, so those were the people we would call to help our contact rate,” she said. The campaign created a system that allowed for tailored fund-raising appeals to individual voters. One voter might get an appeal for, say, $213, and another voter got an appeal for a different amount. “Those weren’t random numbers that were being put in there,” she said. “Testing had shown us that if you asked for that amount you’re more likely to get it based on their previous history.” They built a model that told them who was more likely to give online versus who was more likely to respond to direct mail. They saved money by telling their phone vendors not to call certain people; they knew those people wanted to give only online and did not want to be bothered on the phone. In the fall of 2011 the campaign sent out a big direct mail solicitation from Michelle Obama. Half was sent to a list drawn in the traditional way, the other half based on the campaign’s analytic model. Messina said, “Wagner said, ‘I’m going to overperform them.’” He did, by 14 percent.
Virtually every e-mail sent by the campaign included a test of some sort—the subject line, the appeal, the message—all designed to maximize contributions, volunteer hours, and eventually turnout on election day. There was nothing particularly new about this, but it could mean millions of dollars lost or gained and a more efficient use of volunteers’ time. The campaign would break out eighteen smaller groups from their e-mail lists, create eighteen different versions of an e-mail, and then watch the response rate for an hour and go with the winner—or take a combination of subject line and message from different e-mails and turn them into the finished product. Big corporations had used such testing for years, but political campaigns had not. In the Obama tests, the differences among e-mails sometimes were as great as 90 percent. Mitch Stewart said the 2012 campaign was light-years ahead of 2008 in its technical precision and efficiency. “When you’re spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, finding 3 percent efficiency, or 8 percent, that’s real money,” he said.
From modeling and testing, the campaign refined voter outreach. Years earlier, political scientists Don Green and Alan Gerber of Yale had first shown convincingly that there was added value by having volunteers knock on the doors of prospective voters. The Obama campaign discovered that while that was generally the case, it wasn’t always so, that some voters were more likely to respond to different kinds of contact. “Up until ’12, I would stake my career on the fact that door knocking is the most powerful communication tool that we have, face-to-face communication essentially in terms of grassroots organizing,” Dillon said. “[But] I don’t think you can say today that door-to-door contact is more effective communication for all voters. You need to understand the way people want to take it in. It doesn’t have to be a door knock. It could be a phone call from the person you know or a shared article that you read that they’d be more likely to open because you shared it.”
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From their post-2008 analysis and other research into management practices, Obama’s field team concluded that the best management ratio was six or eight to one. That became the model for building the organization—one field director would have half a dozen deputies. The deputies would have six to eight regional field directors, who in turn would oversee the work of six to eight field organizers. Those field organizers were members of the paid staff and also were the connection between the paid team and the volunteers. They interacted directly with the neighborhood team leaders, who led the campaign in their local areas. As was often the case, these neighborhood team leaders were in their fifties or sixties, being directed by Obama campaign field organizers in their twenties.
With those ratios in mind and with an early estimate of the size of the electorate and the likely vote totals they would need to win specific states, the campaign calculated that it would need to recruit fifteen thousand neighborhood team leaders to oversee hundreds of thousands of volunteers. After continuous tweaking of their models, they ended up at just over ten thousand. By November 2011, they had relatively concrete goals for their field operation. In actual numbers they were far short of what they needed—short too of the size of their army in 2008. Starting early and working methodically, they established goals for organizing, held state organizers accountable to meet them, and eventually filled out the organization. The year before the election, Obama’s advisers began setting state-by-state goals. “We didn’t care at all [about] national demographics,” Bird said. “It needs to be states. How can we get the demographics in a place where we can win?” The campaign looked at three groups: Who was registered and who wasn’t? What was the existing and potential electorate? Could they change the composition? Were the people who weren’t registered likely to vote Democratic? “That was number one,” Bird said. “That was how many people can we register and can we change the pie?” Next they analyzed who had voted for Obama in 2008 but did not vote at all in 2010—the sporadic voters. How many would they need to get to 50 percent? The third group was the pool of potential undecided voters, people who had voted for Obama in 2008 but had voted for Republicans in 2010. Once that analysis was done, the next step was to determine the right blend for each state. “In Nevada the blend was registration and turnout,” he said. “We didn’t need to persuade a single undecided voter if we did our registration work right. In Florida we had to do all three [registration, persuasion, and turnout], and they were all three huge tasks because just the size of all of them is massive.” The campaign established metrics for each state in the early summer of 2011 and then kept refining them. “The worst thing that campaigns do is they set up a plan, they set up a strategy, and they think it’s a noun—like, ‘I got a strategy’—and it’s really a verb,” Bird said. “You should be changing it as you move forward.” They were trying to create an electorate as partial to Obama as possible so that they could win even if the odds said otherwise.
The campaign’s attention to detail rivaled that of the best corporations. Dillon and her team believed in training and preparation and set up a training operation unlike anything campaigns had done previously. “If you think of innovations in campaigns, it could be the biggest we had,” Bird told me. The campaign provided volunteers with training on everything from how to use and manipulate all the data available to how to talk to voters on their doorsteps. Over some objections, Messina approved a budget to cover the cost of training directors in the battleground states. Another innovation was the recruitment of corporate trainers or coaches, who volunteered their time to help teach everyone how to manage. “We recruited a whole group of pro bono executive coaches,” he said. “These are people that coach Fortune 100 companies.” Obama’s team recruited them as volunteers, but instead of having them knock on doors, they were asked to provide management training. “We had them partner up with our state leadership,” Bird said. “They didn’t need to know anything about campaigns, because we didn’t want their advice on how to run a campaign. We wanted their advice on how to be a manager.”
The better trained the volunteers, the more effective they would
be. The campaign prepared another thick binder that described best practices for volunteers. They wrote and rewrote scripts to be used when volunteers went knocking on doors. They embraced the work of social scientists—an increasingly common practice in political campaigns—to help them find the right language for those scripts. They consulted with what the New York Times later called a “dream team” of academics—who called themselves the “consortium of behavioral scientists”—for advice. The group included political scientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists. The campaign was operating well outside of the traditional network of political consultants. Many of the insights came from academic research that was three or four decades old but up to now mostly ignored by political strategists. Obama’s team embraced it, as Bush’s 2004 campaign had embraced the work done by political scientists on the efficacy of face-to-face communications, and integrated it into its targeting efforts.
Throughout 2011, Obama advisers were baffled by the slow start to the Republican presidential race. They knew from their own experience in 2008 how long it took to build a field operation capable of winning a presidential campaign. They were even more keenly aware of the lead times and money required to build the technological infrastructure to support a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation for 2012. Republicans could see that the Obama campaign was spending tens of millions of dollars in 2011. They weren’t sure on what.
BOOK TWO
THE REPUBLICANS
CHAPTER 7
Mapping the Race
During the Christmas holidays in 2006, Mitt Romney and his family—five sons, five daughters-in-law, and many grandchildren—gathered at their home in Utah. They were there to make a final decision about a campaign for president, which Romney had been pointing toward for more than a year. A video of their activities showed Romney energetically shoveling snow off the deck of their home, Romney sledding with his grandchildren, children sliding down stairs on mattresses, the general chaos of a house filled with people and constant activity. One clip showed Romney saying grace before dinner. Ann Romney narrated most of the video, talking about her relationship with her husband and their experiences traveling the country as they were exploring a candidacy. The video concluded with the family seated in the living room talking about the pros and cons of Romney running for president, with the prospective candidate taking notes on a pad of paper. “If people really get to know who you are, it could be a success,” Craig Romney said to the others in the family. Tagg Romney, the oldest son, said in the video, “I don’t think you have a choice. I think you have to run.” He added, “I look at the way your life has unfolded. You’re gifted. You’re smart. You’re intelligent. But you’ve also been extraordinarily lucky. So many things have broken your way that you couldn’t have predicted or controlled that it would be a shame not to at least try, and if you don’t win, we’ll still love you.” “Maybe,” Romney interjected, to chuckles from his family. “Maybe.” Tagg picked up again: “The country may think of you as a laughingstock, and we’ll know the truth and that’s okay. But I think you have a duty to your country and to God to see what comes of it.” At that Christmas gathering, the family took a vote on whether Romney should run. The five sons voted yes, their wives voted yes. Mitt and Ann Romney voted yes.
Four years later, when the Romney family gathered for their Christmas holiday, they faced a similar decision. This time they were in Hawaii and they sat together on a balcony one evening to share their thoughts about a second campaign. This time there was no video record of the meeting, and the vote would have shocked a political community closely monitoring the preliminary maneuvering for the 2012 race. Even some of Romney’s closest political advisers might have been surprised. When they polled the group in Hawaii, ten of the twelve family members voted no. Mitt Romney was one of those ten voting against another campaign. The only yes votes were from Ann Romney and Tagg Romney. Some of the reservations were personal. All of them knew how disruptive and invasive a presidential campaign would be in their lives. “None of us were looking forward to the process,” Tagg Romney said. “We’re a pretty private family, to be honest with you. Having that privacy yanked away was not going to be fun. That was an underlying reason—but not the driving reason. You tasted the bitter pill once, you didn’t want to go bite into it a second time.” The more fundamental reason so many were opposed was that they feared the campaign ahead would be as brutal as it would be uncertain. “The basic reason was I think a lot of them thought, looking at it, saying, ‘This is going to be a really tough primary campaign to win,’” Tagg Romney said. And if his father were to win he would face an incumbent with a billion dollars, much of it used to attack and attack and attack.
Mitt Romney had other reasons to think that not running might be the wiser choice. Winning as a moderate from Massachusetts who happened to be Mormon was always going to be difficult. “A lot of the thinking on the part of my brothers and my dad was, ‘I’m not sure I can win a primary given those dynamics,’” Tagg Romney said. The prospective candidate also knew the sheer physical and family toll another campaign would take. “He’s a private person and, push comes to shove, he wants to spend time with his family and enjoy his time with them,” his son said. “Even up until the day before he made the announcement, he was looking for excuses to get out of it. If there had been someone who he thought would have made a better president than he, he would gladly have stepped aside.”
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Confidence about Romney’s commitment to running never wavered in Boston, where his team had been mapping the race for months. On Thursday, December 9, 2010, just weeks before the family vote in Hawaii, Romney gathered his senior campaign team at the family’s oceanside home in La Jolla, California, for a full-scale discussion of a 2012 campaign. The team was full speed ahead, and Romney had done nothing to slow the machinery. In fact, he had done everything a likely candidate needed to do. He had spent the previous year helping to elect Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy; meeting with prospective donors; promoting his book, No Apology; campaigning around the country for and giving money to Republican candidates. Romney used his national and state political action committees to ingratiate himself with state and local candidates in the early states and elsewhere, giving nearly $400,000 to three hundred candidates, according to Nicholas Confessore and Ashley Parker in the New York Times. “State auditors, county commissioners, sheriffs: no Republican candidate, it seems, has been insignificant enough to escape the glow of Mitt Romney’s affections,” they wrote. To those who followed him on some of those trips to see donors, he was far more focused than during his first campaign. Whatever reservations he may have had about a second campaign, he kept them out of view of the political advisers around him.
In La Jolla, the group was large. The attendees included Matt Rhoades, who ran Romney’s political action committee and was slotted to manage the campaign; Beth Myers, who had managed the 2008 campaign and remained one of Romney’s longest-serving and most loyal advisers; and Eric Fehrnstrom, a former journalist and longtime Romney spokesman and adviser. Bob White was there. He was Romney’s partner when Bain Capital was founded and was the candidate’s closest confidant. Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, partners in one of the Republican Party’s best-known media firms, were there in their capacity as strategists and message gurus. Stevens would become the campaign’s chief strategist. Ron Kaufman, who retained close ties to former president George H. W. Bush and was the Republican national committeeman from Massachusetts, was there as a veteran of many presidential campaigns, an experienced counselor now devoted to making Romney president. Others included Spencer Zwick, the well-regarded finance director whose task would be more difficult the second time around because of a decision that Romney would not, if at all possible, dip into his personal fortune to fund the campaign as he had done in 2008. Zac Moffatt, who would oversee the campaign’s digital operation, was part of the group
, as was Kelli Harrison, Romney’s personal assistant. Family members included the candidate’s wife and two of the couple’s five sons, Tagg and Matt. The only one missing from this inner circle was Peter Flaherty, who with Myers and Fehrnstrom had served Romney as governor and after the 2008 campaign together had formed their own political consulting firm. A family problem prevented him from being there.
The conversation was broad-based: What’s the rationale for the campaign, what would it feel like, when would it have to start? Romney had been expressing his concerns about Obama and the administration’s economic policies, but at this first big meeting the focus was less on the president and more on what kind of race Romney would need to run. The group surveyed the field of prospective rivals for the nomination. They discussed whether John Thune, the senator from South Dakota, would jump in. They talked about the possibility that Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, or Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, would join the race. (Stevens always insisted that Barbour, a former client, would not, and had told Barbour he did not think he should run.) But there was no talk about how the entry of one or another of the potential candidates would influence Romney’s decision or strategy. Romney had learned that lesson from his first campaign: Above all he had to run his own race.